I cannot tell you how many times I have heard this statement in the past two months. Prior to that, I was willing to accept that, okay, I was less than five months, and it took me a long time to show when pregnant with the tiny man, so okay…maybe I didn’t look pregnant. But now? Now I”m seven months. I’m huge. My belly has actually grown beyond the … uh … other frontal appendages I sport, and that’s saying something, because the girls? They are impressive. I am the size of a small duplex. And sometimes when I am talking to someone new, and I mention “when the baby comes”, they say to me “Oh, are you pregnant?”

I know that many people, me included, believe that it is really really bad to ask anyone if they are pregnant, or when they are expecting. Mostly because you just never know. I have made this error, after garnering what I *thought* were conversational clues indicating the status of a friend’s uterus. It was a friend I hadn’t seen an awhile, and while she didn’t look any different (really, she didn’t), I thought I had gotten from the context of the conversation that she was pregnant. And I asked her when she was due. And flames shot from her eyes and singed all the hair off of my body as she said in a voice resembling some satanic demon in a horror movie “I’m not pregnant”. The “bitch” at the end was not stated, but implied.

But me? I have a basketball in my stomach right now. I think I look pretty damn pregnant. Apparently other people think I have gained an inordinate amount of weight this summer, and I’m just living the high life, sitting on my couch eating boxes of Hostess while entertaining Little Debbie simultaneously. Because, PEOPLE, I am the size of a house.

And when someone says to you something about “when the baby comes”, it is just as bad to say “oh are you pregnant” to a seven-month-pregnant woman as it is to ask one who is not pregnant when they are due. The former will go home and cry all afternoon, while the latter will commence Hari Kari on your person. Really? It’s no different.